Archives for July 2016

We started the season with 7 points in 8 games. That’s 0.88 PPG and a cume of 1.05 PPG in 42 games with last season. Since then we are at 1.93 PPG over 15 games.

We also started the season with 18 points in the first 15 games for 1.20 PPG and 1.12 over 49 games cume with last year. Since then we won 18 points in 8 games for 2.25 PPG.

In 2014, New England had a 1.15 PPG over its first 20 games which featured both a 5-game winning streak and an 8-game losing streak. They finished with 2.29 PPG over the last 14 and 55 points overall.

Last year when we were in a truly hopeless situation people sometimes pointed to the 2014 Revs as a reason to hope, but at our best we were barely as good as them at their worst. This year we kind of look like them if you take your glasses off and squint a little.

We have a 3-game Home winning streak.

We had 6 Draws in the first 14 games, and none in the last 9.

We are 4-2-0 against the West 2.0 PPG.

We are 6-5-6 against the East 1.41 PPG.

So if we were in the West we’d be in 1st Place of that tough conference, just like we’re in the middle of the East table…. Oh wait, it doesn’t work that way.

We are 4-3-5 at Home 1.41 PPG.

We are 6-4-1 on the Road 1.73 PPG.

Our Goal Differential against the entire league excluding NJRB is +8.

Our GD against the West is +5. The rest of the East against the West is -18.

Last week there were 4 teams capable of catching us with the help of just one NYCFC loss or less. Toronto kept pace, but Philly lost, and Montreal and NJRB drew. So we now have a minimally bigger cushion, but spots 1 through 5 in the table are really quite tight and the team cannot afford to start dropping points. Plus the Impact and Red Bull draws were on the road and both were earned with goals after the 85-minute mark. This was not a bad week of East Conference results but it was not as good as it nearly was, or should have been.

Right now we sit top of the East with projected 53 points. The last time the East winner had that few points was SKC in 2011 with 51 (the first year they played 34 games). The next lowest East winners since then had 59 points.

My what-we-need-to-do chart doesn’t even go up to 59, but figure we need to win 7 or 8 of the remaining 11.

Think on this: we could get to 50 points with a losing record here on out.

Last year Montreal only had to get 5 or 6 points out of the extra 5 games they had in hand for most of the summer to put real distance between them and NYCFC. We were usually just a few points behind them all year and they spent a lot of time in sixth place. They were deceptively close and gave people false hope, because it seemed like one win by us and one loss by them and we would be in great shape.

Right now, in contrast, Toronto is 9 points back of us with 3 games in hand. They have to win all 3 just to get even with us. That’s worth knowing, because it is a possibility. We are not as far ahead of them as a 9-point lead seems. But we are, in fact, ahead of them.

For me the expected easy part of the schedule where I thought we should have built up points was the first 9 games. Six at Home, only 3 Away, and the 3 Away were Chicago, Philly and Columbus. Philly and Columbus traded places in terms of how strong they are this year so that’s a wash. The home opponents are less important because good MLS teams should be able to beat everyone at home. Chicago and Houston in 10th place each have winning records at home. We have the worst Home record in the league. As it happens our 6 opponents for those early home games included only 3 teams currently in the playoffs, and they are at positions 5 (TOR) 6 (NER) and 6 (VAN). At the end of those 9 games we had 10 points and we should have had 17-22 out of 27.

One additional note on the schedule. Before the season I did a quick prediction of W-L-D for every game. I was intentionally optimistic and it came to 51 points. I have since been comparing actual results to those predictions. This is of course even less scientifically rigorous than anything else I post here. I spent about 5 minutes on this pre-season, and it really reflected my view of the schedule more than anything else. After 8 games the team had a 14 point deficit to my prediction. After a 3 game win streak the deficit was down to 5 by Game 11, but climbed back to 14 after the loss to RSL. Right now the deficit is at 5. My optimistic prediction to get to 51 points had us at 38 now, and going only 3-5 4 from here to the end of the season. Currently I think we can do better than that and have a decent shot at erasing this fictional deficit. But I think predictions are hard, especially when they concern the future.

One quirk I just noticed is that NYCFC is done playing all of other top 4 teams in the East for the rest of the season. The remainder of the East Conference games for the Blue Meanies are against teams currently ranked 6 through 10 on the Table.* That’s should be good for us. Meanwhile, MTL, PHI, RB and TFC all play the others 5 times each between now and the end of the season. That’s 10 games where as of now we’ll be hoping for ties. At worst, one of the teams comes out of those games with nothing.

* In contrast, of our 5 remaining games against the West, 3 are against teams currently sitting in spots 1 through 3 in the West Table.

How close the race for first place in the East?
Montreal (4th Place) can pass us without needing us to lose or even tie.
Philadelphia (3rd) and Toronto (5th) can tie us without needing us to lose or even tie, and will have tie-breaker advantage.
RB (2nd) can tie us with the help of one NYC tie and will have tie-breaker advantage, and can pass us with one NYCFC loss.
The odd thing is the team in second place (NJRB) is the one that needs the most help to pass us, but the important thing is two bad games could easily drop us to 5th place. Sixth would take a bit more and there’s a decent cushion before dropping out of the playoffs into 7th. But spots 1-5 are really bunched up.

We followed our 3-game win streak by getting 5 points in the next 5 games.

We just finished a 4-game home stand where we managed 4 points, and for which most of us expected 6-9 points. This made worse an already bad home record.

The combined Away record of our 4 opponents for that home stand before it started was 3 Wins 14 Losses and 5 Ties.

We have 3 Home losses and 2 of them gave our opponent their only Away win of the season so far.

Yet we stand in 3rd place, only two points out of first (although with games in hand).

In the PPG standings we have slipped to 5th place. I think we were as high as third in the PPG standings at some point but I don’t have a record of it. We were definitely in 4th place 2 games ago.
The PPG line is up to 43. When I started the thread it was at 38. We have a ~1.5 PPG cushion. When I started the thread we were in 6th and defined the playoff line so that’s an improvement but it would be nice to have more.
So, worse than we hoped, but better than some alternatives, including last year.

How we get to various point totals over the remaining 18 games:

If we keep ties to a minimum, we just need to go 2 games over .500 and we should be in good shape. But as ties go up so must the number of wins over losses

What’s Next
7 of our next 9 games are on the road. Between now and August 13 we will have a very good idea if our very solid road record is something real we can count on, or a flash in the pan. After that stretch we finish with 5 at home and 4 away.
What we are up against are 7 teams whose collective Home Record is 28-12-12 for 1.85 PPG. Put another way, opposing teams who have visited the 7 teams we are about to visit have managed only 0.92 PPG against them.
That doesn’t mean we’re destined to do that. We underachieved at home. We now have to overachieve on the road. But not by much if we take care of business at home starting now.
Let’s say we win both home games in this stretch against the Red Bulls and Colorado.
2-0-0 | 6 Pts | 3.0 PPG
Then we can go just
2-4-1 | 7 Pts | 1.0 PPG on the road
for a combined
4-4-1 | 13 Pts | 1.44 PPG in the 9-game stretch.
Then we would have 34 points with 9 to play and can see a clear path to the playoffs. But if we drop points against RB or Colorado, at home, the road games become more crucial.

Nice article on MLSoccer about the Blues’ road record, adding more info and context to my post on the same topic::New York City FC continue historic road form in Montreal
Our current 1.90 PPG on the road would be second best in MLS history if we keep it that high. The record is 2.0 by the 2010 LA Galaxy. Four teams share the record of 9 road wins, and three of them won Supporters Shield. Our weak Home record to date very likely keeps us from that achievement even if we do get the 9 road wins. To match LAG’s 2.0 PPG, we need 15 points in the last 7 road games, which means either winning 5 or winning 4 with 3 ties and no losses.

The interesting part to me about these graphs is how similar the lines are. We’re obviously doing better. You don’t need a graph to know that. But we started nearly identical through 8 games, then diverged for 5-6, then went on a somewhat parallel rise.
What we need to hope — and this seems likely — is for a second big divergence the rest of the way. The team got worse at the end of last season, earning only 13 points in the last 13 games (including only 4 points in the next 7 games), which was below the season average, which led to lots of discussions of whether the midseason replacements did the team any good. That’s an issue we don’t really have this year and it seems we’re in a nice period of stability.

There are a couple of sites that do a decent job of predicting playoff odds.

The first ishttp://playoffstatus.com/mls/easternstandings.html
It is already updated through last night and gives us 94% of making the playoffs, and 54% of finishing first or second.
The second site is http://www.sportsclubstats.com/USA/NYCFC.html. It has lots of fun ways to break things down, including a much more detailed playoff line breakdown. It’s problem is (1) it does not update regularly and sometimes not for a few weeks, and (2) even when it is on schedule it does the week on an annoying Sunday thru Saturday basis even though every MLS week ends on Sunday. It is currently now up-to-date through Friday. For us that means it has the SKC game but not yesterday and has the playoff chances at 88.8% which is really in line with the other site. But it also shows, for example, that if we finish with 55 points there is a 61% chance we finish first in the East and 1% chance of Supporters Shield. At 59 points there would be a 24.2% chance we win SS. One of the most fun features here is showing the effect that the result of upcoming games will have on playoff chances. But because it is behind schedule that’s not as much fun. For example, it says a loss to the Impact would knock the playoff chances down 2.9% and a win raises it 7.2%.